MODULATIONOF PUNGENCY AND MAJOR BIOACTIVE COMPOUNDS IN PEPPER DUE TO AGRO-CLIMATIC DISCREPANCY: A CASE STUDY WITH CAPSICUM CHINENSE BHUT JOLOKIA FRUIT
Keywords:
Bhut Jolokia, HPTLC, Antioxidant, Pungency, GC-MSAbstract
Objectives: The use of pepper fruit is renowned for its capsaicin content that has numerous beneficial effects in food and pharmaceutical industry. However pepper fruits exhibit wide variations in the accumulation of capsaicin depending on agro-climatic conditions. Therefore, we have performed experiments to evaluate the variation of major bioactive compounds including capsaicin of world second hottest chili pepper BhutJolokia fruit across two different agro-climatic conditions.
Methods: All the analysis was done according to standard protocols.
Results: Biochemical combined with High Performance Thin layer Chromatography (HPTLC) analyses confirmed significant differences in major bioactive compounds including capsaicin due to the variation in agro-climatic conditions as well as elevation. It was observed that total phenolic and flavonoid content of BhutJolokia fruit (BJ-N) cultivated in Nagaland were more than 2-fold higher compared to the fruits (BJ-W) cultivated in West Bengal. The amount of capsaicin was found to be 4.345–folds higher in BJ-N compared to BJ-W. The Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis revealed that the chemical composition of the BhutJolokia fruits growing in two different geographical location also exhibit chemodiversity.
Conclusion: An overabundance of the agro-climatic conditions likely to differ across the two different elevations. There may be a complex interaction among these different features that play a key role of this significant variation of fruit phenotype as well as major bioactive compounds. The decrease in elevation may be the key reason of the trade-offs of pungency and important secondary metabolites in pepper fruit cultivated in West Bengal.
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